


And they called us heroes

by HeavensArcher



Series: Jaegercon Bingo [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mentions of Suicide, OC centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeavensArcher/pseuds/HeavensArcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"OC" fill. They witnessed the beginning, fought throughout. They saw their brothers and sisters fall around them as the kaiju crushed their jaegers beneath their feet. But they still fought on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And they called us heroes

(O.C)

She remembered when the first kaiju appeared. She had been vacationing in San Francisco with a group of her college friends when it rose from the sea, like something out of a movie. The beast was terrible. The day seemed to stand still. Time seemed to stretch to infinity. You could feel the collective heart of the city stutter and stall as its people and visitors stared up at the looming shape before that heartbeat began _raceracerace_ and they all _ran._

Nothing seemed to stop it. The combined efforts of an air assault and ground assault barely seemed to phase it at all. Missiles were fired, magazine after magazine emptied into its seemingly impenetrable hide. It shrugged off the assault as if brushing off a fly, swatting away fighter jets and crushing tanks underfoot.

The people hid in alleys, in the sewer system, in their houses, they tried to get out. Some did. Most didn’t. People were trampled in everyone’s haste to get to safety.

Finally, after 5 days and millions of lives, the creature finally fell and didn’t get back up.

She went home alone, with light injuries, having been on the other side of the building to her friends. The other side was crushed beneath the weight of the creature and there were no survivors.

Everyone told them they were lucky. Remembering the faces of those around her as they dissolved in the creature’s acidic blood, or were crushed under its monstrous feet or the buildings it brought down around it; remembering her face and the faces of those around her realising whoever they were searching for weren’t there.  It was hard to feel like they were lucky, she thought to herself.

Very hard indeed.

XXX

It seemed almost natural to her to sign up to the PPDC when it was first announced. Her hands lightly danced across the scars the splashes of kaiju blue had left behind on her torso and it felt right. It felt right to fight.

XXX

The first series of jaegers, of hunters, were piloted by those who had already been in the various militaries and transferred across. Other recruits groaned in disappointment. But she did not. Despite being one of the top recruits, on a fast track to pilot her own jaeger as soon as they began compatibility tests and paired up the remaining recruits, she had no wish to be in the Mark Is.

Anyone that knew anything about technology always knew that the first test of a program had glitches.

XXX

Lightning Hawk, they called the Mark II. The jaeger had a golden sheen and an almost beaked helmet. It’s nuclear reactor core glowed ominously in its chest and it’s armour was thinner and lighter than usual. The original Mark Is pilots where slowly falling, to the kaiju to the radiation that poisoned their bodies. The Mark IIs rolled out as fast as possible. Lightning Hawk had been drawn up and built quickly, with what material was on hand. The result was a jaeger that couldn’t take nearly as many hits.

But he was fast. He was very fast and she had wanted him.

They certainly didn’t turn her away. One of the PPDC’s brightest newly graduated pilots. Her instructors had talked to the Marshall, agreeing that her more agile style would be perfect for a jaeger that was able to move with greater speed and flexibility if they could find a co-pilot to compliment her.

XXX

They introduced her to him and something clicked. The first time she had him at her mercy on the floor of the training mats and he only smiled she felt something mesh and without acknowledging the other hopefuls, the Marshall nodded and told them to be ready to be fitted into their drive suits at 0800 tomorrow morning.

XXX

The drift was like nothing else. It was exposing and horrible and wonderful and comforting and _beautiful_ and the first time he smiled and she felt the smile brighten as he looked at her she was gone.

XXX

The others at their shatterdome kept count. They counted their kills, the categories of the kaiju, the other jaegers involved in the mission if it was a joint deploy but they never did. They never felt the need. They never had to explain to each other why. He felt that the idea of counting was sick because of the lives and environment they decimated. Why would you count your successes when even the successes dealt so much damage? Not to trivialise their role, he knew so much more was at stake without their intervention and he was proud to be a part of the program, proud to pilot. He simply didn’t see the wish to count.

She simply didn’t think the beasts were worth the acknowledgement. Counting them felt like giving them recognition.

At their request, LOCCENT didn’t record a collective number of their successes. But their jaeger’s file had 6 subfiles dedicated to different deployments and they were the pride of their shatterdome.

XXX

They rarely were sent out far into the ocean. Lightning Hawk was best in the shallower water and thus held the miracle mile. Other jaegers knew that having a kaiju reaching the miracle mile almost ensured they were reach land.

Not a single kaiju had passed them yet.

XXX

They met the Kaidonovsky’s while on a joint mission and shared loud music over their comms as they waited for the Kaiju to appear. It was the first category III and they didn’t want to risk anything. So they sent two of their best.

They bonded over the way they loved their music blaring to deafen their ears to the piercing screeches of the kaiju. The woman became fast friends bonding over how the two jaegers worked together to rip the kaiju in half, splashing kaiju blue across their chest plates. The men shared smiles over the way they looked at the two women.

XXX

Marks Is, Mark IIs fell, Mark IIIs fell and the Mark IVs fought as the newest children to their family of destruction. The Kaidonovsky’s were the final Mark I and they were the last remaining Mark II and they shared stories over bitter, strong vodka of their fellow brothers and sisters that fell in the crushing metal and explosions.

The two teams shared bitter laughs over the fact that they were the last two teams that they had expected to last this long. One of the poisonous Mark Is and the Mark II made of spare parts. They watched as the newest pilots fell around them. Fell into the blackness of the ocean, fell with ideas of invincibility plastered across their mind.

A tear ran down her face as she watched Gipsy Danger stagger to shore and collapse with only one pilot. All the pilot teams were solemn and mourning when the news broke and they moved until they were touching their other half, their co-pilot. They all knew they’d rather die than lose half their mind. It felt right to kiss each other then.

(Command called it a victory, the other pilots spit at the idea. It was a disaster. A loss. None of them acknowledged it as a victory.)

XXX

Another joint mission with Cherno Alpha (why mess with a good thing? The speed of Hawk coupled with the durability of Cherno were a match made in heaven), another kaiju off a coastline. Except this one is another Mark IV, one of the first. Another had been fought and killed off Australia, but had dragged one of the jaegers down with it. One more had recently been pummeled by the Wei Triplets off the coast of Hong Kong.

Except this one was…it knew so many of their moves. The teams were having to come up with new combos on the spot, trying to outdo the creature. The original plan of Cherno battling while Hawk watched the miracle mile had been abandoned as the kaiju seemed to predict every one of Cherno’s moves.

The teams improvised over their comms, Cherno’s powerful strikes ripping into the face of the creature while the smaller, lighter Hawk did everything it could to hold it in place, interlacing its legs with the creatures and its arms wrapping under its and holding its hands behind the kaiju’s head, locking it in place.

The battle was fierce and lasted almost 18hrs.

Afterwards, neither she/he/they couldn’t tell you what his/her/their name was. Her/his/their thoughts and memories were so mixed up they couldn’t tell them apart, couldn’t tell each other’s minds apart.

XXX

They still couldn’t really tell each other apart. They didn’t need to. As far as they were concerned they were one. They were the maid of honour and best man respectively at the wedding of the Kaidonovsky’s, the two finally deciding to make their bond official after years of introducing themselves with the same last name.

The two asked if they were planning on ‘making it official’ they joked. And the two smiled and shook their heads, they didn’t need to. The drift shared everything, they knew they both knew there was no other.

But later that night, on the deserted pier overlooking the black ocean where so many of their family now lay in watery graves, the two looked into each other’s eyes, holding hands, pressed against one another. The Kaidonovsky’s looked on, Sasha in her short white dress with combat jacket over it and Aleksis in dress pants and partically unbuttoned long sleeved dress shirt and they smiled. After the two had finished the other team came and joined them, holding each other’s hands and smiling.

The last of a dying breed.

XXX

The jaeger program was having its funding cut. The money was going into the walls.

They could imagine the look on the faces of the Russians. They imagine it looked similar to the disbelief and disgust currently on their own.

If giant metal monsters that were piloted by people that could adjust to a situation at a moment’s notice kept dying as the kaiju adapted, how did they expect an immobile wall to keep them at bay?

That meant less upgrades, less complete repairs…

They were no longer the army.

They were the resistance.

XXX

The Kaidonovsky’s rang to tell them they’d see them in Hong Kong with some of the good stuff. They had laughed their agreement and promised to hook them up with the best zakuski they could scrounge up and stash away.

Five minutes later, the klaxons rang out.

They quickly hooked up to Hawk and dropped out in the bay.

XXX

The Kaidonovsky’s refused to even greet anyone that was there. Not even Becket, who the marshall had apparently found climbing some wall.

“What’s up with them?” Raleigh found himself asking Tendo later as they stood looking at the newly rebuilt Gipsy Danger.

“Justin Hartman and Lisa Ryles of Lightning Hawk went down just off Los Angeles.” He replied stiffly.

“Yeah but…”

“They were the last Mark II jaeger pilots. They had done countless joint missions with them. One of the last two teams stilling running from the first two years of the jaegers being released…They went down 3 days ago. Just as they were about to leave for here.”

Raleigh swallowed, “Do we…know what happened?”

Tendo breathed in deeply through his nose and his whole body tensed. “Lightning Hawk was one of the last of the first set of Mark IIs to be made. They hadn’t realised the problem with the Mark I radiation and the pilots were…dropping. So they needed another jaeger to replace one of the fallen Mark Is.”

He turned to Raleigh. “Lightning Hawk was made with the remaining metal from the recent construction of the other Mark IIs. It was smaller, and it didn’t have nearly as much armour as it needed to survive the brute strength of a kaiju. But Justin and Lisa did it anyway, and they made it work.”

He turned away and stared over the Shatterdome. “They died because the constant cuts in funding meant they weren’t properly repaired between battles. The other jaegers…they could take it. Their armour was massive originally. Hawk’s wasn’t. Two hits in the same area by the kaiju compromised their helm. The neural load…ripped Justin’s mind to shreds. Lisa…they say their LOCCENT operators won’t ever forget her screams. I’ve heard the comm recording and I…it was just as bad as you, Rals. I mean, you went dead silent but she…it sounded like her heart was being ripped out of her chest. It was…inhuman. She finished off the kaiju. Pounded it to mush. Kept firing shots into it even after it was dead.”

“So she’s alive?” Raleigh asked, relieved.

Tendo’s face turned blank. “Her and Justin had been each other’s copilots since that jaeger finished being built.  Together they rivalled only the Russians in time spent in drift. They been….together…for a long time.

“She shot herself. Straight after she’d finished reducing the kaiju to mincemeat. One second she was there connected to the drift, the next second, gone.”

Raleigh bowed his head slightly, as he sent a prayer after the two pilots.

Together or not at all.


End file.
